Transport Infrastructure

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 1:35 pm on 2 March 2022.

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Photo of Lee Waters Lee Waters Labour 1:35, 2 March 2022

Thank you. As you say, the roads review is looking at the red route, along with 54 other schemes, and it's doing that methodically, and it will report in the summer. So, we shouldn't second-guess what the outcome of that process will be, because I'm assuming there will be road schemes going ahead, but I'm also assuming that a large number of them will not be. So, it's entirely reasonable to anticipate what would happen in that scenario. I think I'd just point to him, on the funding point of view, that this is estimated to be a £300 million scheme; we don't have £300 million sitting in our budget, waiting to be spent on this scheme. Indeed, the whole point of the Burns review into the M4 was to find the solution that cost half the price of the proposed M4 and which still addressed the congestion issue. So, what I'm hoping, through the roads review and the Burns commission for north Wales, is that we'll identify transport solutions to problems that are compatible with our climate change commitments, as well as addressing local transport problems, but we need to do it in a way that makes best use of the funding we have available, bearing in mind that I was just telling the Chamber about the grave situation we have with climate change.

Now, there is significant investment going into north Wales, into public transport improvements. From this May, we'll have an increasing number of services on the borderlands line, between Wrexham and Bidston, to two per hour. We'll have a new hourly service between Liverpool and Llandudno from December 2023, and, from December 2024, a new service every two hours between Liverpool and Cardiff, and an hourly service between Shrewsbury and Liverpool. So, I think, after a long and patient wait for the people of north Wales, the infrastructure investment we're putting in is now bearing fruit. The key task for the Burns commission is to stitch that together, because we want people to feel that the easiest way to get around is public transport for the majority of journeys. That's not the reality for most people at the moment, and our exam question is: how do we get that to change?